We need to stop looking only at the queen bee and start paying attention to the worker bees, too.
Much of the concern about the upcoming presidential election is what will happen if four-time indicted/twice impeached/sexual assaulter/tax fraudster/insurrectionist inspirer/former president Donald Trump loses.
We know there’ll be intense anger rising from some corners of this country. Could that lead to the kind of lawless violence we saw in the Jan. 6 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol? I don’t know.
But I do know this: We rightfully worry about that scenario. We constantly need to defend the integrity of the 2020 election against the bald-faced lie that it was rigged. We must regularly point out the plans Trump and his leeches have for converting our Democracy into an autocracy if given the chance.
But, we can’t lose sight of a group working right now to try to tip the scales in Trump’s favor by doing some rigging of their own: Republican state lawmakers in GOP-controlled states.
The methods of these Trump lemmings include voter suppression by making it harder for some people to vote and to blast away with a tidal wave of challenges to the legitimacy of tens of thousands of voters.
For instance, ProPublica reports that a new law in Georgia will give residents there “more time to contest the eligibility of fellow citizens’ inclusion on voter rolls and make it easier to use questionable evidence in those challenges.”
What should we expect? Well, in 2021 a controversial law went into effect in Georgia that allowed residents to file unlimited voter challenges. That led to just six Right-wing advocates challenging the registration of 89,000 people.
You can read the ProPublica story here.
Now, in case you think that we’re dealing with honest actors and that this isn’t a cover for a large, insidious, mass attack on voters in Georgia, ProPublica reported that conservative organizations have been vocal about their plans to file numerous challenges to voter registrations this year. These groups have even been providing training and other resources help state residents go after their fellow citizens.
Does this look like a fair, thorough effort to find people who aren’t legally registered, or a desperate “Let’s throw as much shit against the wall as we can and see what sticks” operation.
This has nothing to do with “voter integrity.” This is the GOP marshalling its forces – and its money -- for a blitzkrieg on our democracy. It’s a numbers game for them. Fire away and hope they can take out enough Democratic voters to sway the election in their favor.
They’re talking about a legion of voters they want to disqualify. How can they say they’ll find that many before the fact when it’s been shown that voter fraud is so rare that it had no effect on the 2020 election? They’re announcing their results before they do any real work. They’re telling you in advance what they’re trying to do, and it isn’t good.
We aren’t paying enough attention to the cheating that the GOP is doing now to try to win. And what about the cheating they’ll do once the votes are in and Biden is the winner? Remember they were willing to go as far as trying to get state legislatures to throw out their lawful vote and replace Biden delegates with Trump’s to overturn the Electoral College results.
Now they’ve had four years to think up ways to cheat, along with the “legal” things Republicans in Congress are doing to try to protect Trump and smear Biden.
I know if it isn’t your nature to cheat then your ability to detect and anticipate cheating by the other side might not be the best. But we have to understand this: Republicans will lie, cheat, and steal to win. And if they lose, they won’t hesitate to try to hijack the vote and flip it to their man.
If we screw this one up, who knows when we’ll get a chance to set things straight.
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